


Fate and the Primrose

by yet_intrepid



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Gen or Pre-Slash, M/M, Pre-Canon, Presumed Dead, aka 'desert!keith cleans things and is sad'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 13:08:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15292191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: Keith's restless, hyped up on terror, but he has enough sense left in him to know that if he goes out flying on the bike, he might strand himself somewhere and never come back.So he cleans instead.





	Fate and the Primrose

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lunarium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunarium/gifts).



> This is a pinch-hit gift for Lunarium/Lorien in the Sheith Flower Exchange!

In the shack, there’s a book of poems.

Keith finds it the night he moves out there, right after getting booted from the Garrison. He’s restless, hyped up on terror, but he has enough sense left in him to know that if he goes out flying on the bike, he might strand himself somewhere and never come back.

So he trudges inside, tugs the string for the bare lightbulb overhead, and drops his backpack on the dust-stuffed sofa. He’s missed dinner, but he can’t stop to eat; there’s not much in the way of supplies and he doesn’t know if he’ll have the energy to find a solution to that first thing in the morning without breakfast. And sleep sounds nice in theory, but he knows it wouldn’t actually happen. So once he’s drunk some water straight from the sink and dried his hands on his pants, Keith starts to clean.

His dad stored a lot of stuff out here, just odds and ends that there wasn’t space for in the house before the fire. There’s an enormous bin of assorted screws, which Keith sets aside to pick through sometime when he gets really bored, and a whole bunch of plastic grocery bags. Huh, he thinks, rubbing the weird texture between a finger and thumb. It’s weird to think about how recently oil-based plastics were phased out. Weirder still to think how time moves, how people tell you it’s straight and steady and chartable when it isn’t.

How people tell you it heals all wounds, when all it’s done for Keith is rip at any scabs that manage to form.

Keith runs a hand through his greasy hair and puts the plastic grocery bags aside, then sits down crosslegged on the floor next to a stack of books that needs sorting. The broadcast’s in his head like the thrum of a waiting engine: _pilot error, pilot error, pilot error_.

Fuck their broadcast, he thinks, but it isn’t satisfying. Nothing’s satisfying, because nothing brings Shiro back.

Still, he turns back to cleaning, because it’s better than sitting frozen there in the flicker of the old bulb and crying himself to sleep on the floor, which seems to be the only alternative at the moment.

And that’s when he finds the book.

Most of the stack next to him consists of the spine-cracked paperback westerns that he remembers his dad reading in the evenings. But there’s also a couple cookbooks, an empty diary, and—at the bottom, making the stack slant precariously against the wall—the volume of poetry.

Keith frowns at it a minute. He hadn’t ever known his dad to be into that kind of thing, which means it was probably his mom’s, which means he probably should just get rid of it so it’s not some kind of constant, taunting reminder. But there’s a note in his dad’s writing stuck between the pages and Keith—well.

Keith’s so lonely that it’s leaving a taste in his mouth.

So he lets the book fall open. _K,_ the note starts, and Keith’s heart leaps. Was this for him? Or is it just that he and his mom have the same initial? It doesn’t fit with the names he always gave her in his head as a kid, but it’s been years since he gave up the certainty that his mom was called Ariel like the Disney mermaid heroine.

_K—_

_A cousin of mine gave me this book when she came home from college. I ain’t read much of it, but this one bit makes me think of you._

_Love always._

There’s no signature, but beneath the writing is a big arrow that points to the opposite page.

Keith takes in a deep, dusty breath. The poem indicated is just a couple lines, all in a block.

_Preserve for us rebellion,_ it says, _lightning, the illusory agreement, a laugh for the trophy slipped from our hands, even the whole lengthy burden that follows, whose difficulty leads us to a new rebellion. Preserve for us fate and the primrose._

“A laugh for the trophy slipped from our hands,” Keith mutters to himself, frowning again. The lonely taste in his mouth is stronger now, bitter and dry on his tongue like the time he had to chew a painkiller because he couldn’t manage to swallow it and his foster family at the time didn’t stock kids’ tylenol.

He wants to like this poem. He does. His dad liked it, and Keith wants—desperately—to feel some whisper-faint connection to everyone he’s lost.

To Shiro, especially. And he doesn’t know what this really has to do with Shiro, this random bit out of a book that his dad wanted to point out to his mom, other than just that pervasive sense of inevitable loss.

Maybe there isn’t another connection. Maybe he just wants to taste something other than the bitter powder of abandonment.

Shiro didn’t abandon him. He knows that. _Pilot error, pilot error_ —yeah, sure. He knows this wasn’t a thing Shiro chose, something designed just to hurt Keith. He knows that wasn’t why his dad died, either, and it probably wasn’t even why his mom left.

But it all tastes the same anyway—like worthlessness. Like anger masking fear.

He reads the poem again and he still hates it. Irrationally, probably, he’ll admit that much. But he doesn’t _want_ to laugh for everything that’s slipped from his hands. He doesn’t _want_ the burden that follows, whether it leads to a new rebellion or not.

And that’s when the tears start, big and hot and unwelcome, and Keith shuts the book before he can ruin it by crying all over the pages like a dumbass. He sticks it back on the top of the stack.

As he forces himself to his feet, looking around for something else to clean, something to do with his hands, anything, the lightbulb flickers out and dies. All that’s left is a shaft of fragile moonlight prying in through a window.

Illusory, Keith thinks.


End file.
